Hail to the King

I just caught up with the most recent season of The Tudors on DVD. Then, sitting down to post a few quick thoughts on it here, I realized I'd never really commented on the show as a whole (other than to mention it in passing while talking about the movie Elizabeth).

As you probably know, the series follows the reign of King Henry VIII, with a particular focus on his many marriages. It's a show full of politics, backstabbing, and sex; it's often played a sort of modern soap opera, albeit set in medieval times. It stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as King Henry, and a variety of other actors, some well-known and some less so. But it can be a bit of a revolving door of a cast; the show may occasionally play with a few historical details, but overall hews closely to the facts, and thus many significant characters meet an untimely demise and exit the show.

To be frank, the show took a while to get going. The pace of the first season is very slow. Performances and production values were enough to keep my interest, but the writing was not particularly strong. At least there was one episode near the end of the season, revolving around the spread of a plague through England, that was the highlight of the run and reason enough to pull me along for another season.

In the second season, things picked up considerably. The story dealt more briskly with the rise and fall of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn, and managed to much more effectively pull me in. I still wouldn't call it one of the best shows around right now, but I was now liking it enough to want to keep watching more episodes.

Season three represents another shift. The show has neither gotten better or worse, but you can sense outside, real world forces exerting pressure on it. The season is trimmed from the 10 episodes of the first two years to just 8 episodes. What's more, the season doesn't focus chiefly on the time of one of Henry's wives, but covers the next two. In addition, the upcoming fourth season has already been announced as the series' last.

So it appears that while the show's network, Showtime, has not lost faith enough to cancel The Tudors outright, they are perhaps finding the show too costly to carry it through to what might have been its creator's intended end. Season three did at times benefit from the faster pace, but at other times it reminded me a bit of the fourth season of Babylon 5, where the story was being artificially compressed for fear of cancellation before wrapping it all up.

I suppose that season three of The Tudors ultimately leaves my opinion unaltered; if you have the patience to get through that first, sometimes tedious, season, it is a rather entertaining piece of work. It does a good job of making drama out of the raw facts, and the cast does a great job of making full characters out of these historical figures.